Procreation
by littledaybreaker
Summary: Part two: Jack contemplates fatherhood. Part three: Angela contemplates motherhood.
1. Procreation

There's an entire family in the lab. A mother, father, three little boys, and a baby girl. The neighbor, the oldest boy's best friend's mother, had found them when she went to organize a play date. "We all assumed they'd been gone on vacation," she told Booth, sobbing. "My husband told me he saw lights on in the basement the other day...They were such a nice family. Never did a thing wrong."

They had been beautiful. Angela smooths the final lines out of the toddler's face: round eyes, curly, flyaway halo of hair, the chubby cheeks of infanthood. Beautiful.

"I finished the drawings," she tells Brennan, swallowing hard. "Mark, Amy, Josh, Will, Sam, and Emma."

"Thank you." She takes the sketchbook from Angela's hands, then pauses. "Are you sick?"

"No." Shrugs. "Fine. Why?"

"Your hands are shaking."

"I'm okay." Shoving her hands in her pockets.

"Good. Could you create a scenario? Zack will be by with the case notes."

"No problem." Angela walks purposefully in the direction of her office, but when she's certain Brennan is distracted with something else, she changes course and swerves into the bathroom. She isn't sure how long she's in there—hours?--but after awhile, there's a knock on the door.

"I'll be out in a minute!"

"I was going to go ahead and create a scenario myself, but Dr. Hodgins said that he would sever my hands at the artery if I touched your computer. Then he stalked off with that worried look on his face."

Angela smiles. "I'll be right there, Zack."

"You _are _sick, aren't you? Go home."

"It's fine, sweetie." She smiles at Zack and Brennan from the doorway of the bathroom. "Let's go."

"I was hoping we could look at Emma," Zack says enthusiastically. He reminds Angela of a Kindergartener, perpetually on his first day of school, so eager to learn. "I want to study the possibilities that could've caused the contortion of her body."

Angela gives the bathroom one last, longing look. "Okay." They'd found Emma's body lodged in the rafters of the garage. "Let's try a couple of possibilities..."

"They were beautiful," she says to no one in particular, looking at the family portrait later that afternoon. "How could anyone just walk into someone's house and...and..."

"It's probably better if you don't think about it," Jack's voice says, coming up behind her. "I was worried about you today."

"Sorry. I know." She turns to face him. "I just keep imagining...what if someone came into _our _house and just...the oldest kid died on his way to the nursery, running when he heard his mother screaming. He died trying to protect his mom and sister. The house is...our house is huge, Jack. If something like this happened to us—to our family—we might not even hear it."

He grabs her arms. "Angela--"

"We should get a guard dog, or at the very least install an alarm system on the bedroom doors and in the hallway..."

"Angela. What in the hell are you talking about?"

"Maybe we'd better sit down."

She'd come up with a million ways to tell him, a million ways that were different than this—creative without being overly cute—and they had all melted away on the tip of her tongue when she and Jack sat on the couch. "I was planning on telling you—all of you—tonight. I had all kinds of creative ways to tell you and...I lost them. All of them. So there it is. We procreated."

He smiles slightly at her use of such a scientific word, and then the meaning sinks in and he falls silent, stunned. "How long've you known?"

"A couple of weeks. I wanted to be sure and...safe before telling you."

He kisses her forehead. "That's why you were so upset about the kids."

She nods. "I guess the Mom Sense is one of the first things to develop."

He laughs, still incredulous, and stands up on the couch. "Hey! Everyone, listen! I, Jack Hodgins, am about to become a father. If you happen to have any objections, come here so I can punch your face in!"

Angela laughs and yanks him down on the couch, the bodies outside momentarily forgotten. Everything will be okay, she's sure of it.


	2. Fatherhood

I've read every book I could find, took the classes, watched the videos, babysat Parker two afternoons a week, practiced getting up in the dead of night from a sound sleep by blasting bagpipe music over the intercom at random intervals. In the six and a half months since Angela sat me down on the couch at the Jeffersonian and said, "we procreated," I have turned fatherhood into a veritable exercise, a new course to master. But tonight is like the final exam and I'm blanking out.

"You're doing great, Mrs. Hodgins," the doctor says encouragingly.

"Shut up," Angela instructs through gritted teeth. "And Montenegro."

"Pardon me?"

"My—_gasp_—last name—is—Montenegro!" the last syllable comes out like a curse and I take the opportunity to offer an update to Booth and Brennan. "Almost there," I announce. "Or at least that's what Dr. Cracked in there says. This, for our viewers just tuning in, is exactly the same thing he said three hours ago."

"I can sit with her for awhile," Brennan offers.

"Sure. Just don't take anything she says literally."

Brennan smiles in that way that she does when she isn't really sure what the hell you're talking about and goes into the room.

It occurs to me that I don't have anything to give the baby—nothing I can give to him the moment he enters the world, nothing for him to carry around and say, "My daddy bought that for me." It's ridiculous, but it seems important, impossibly important, as if everything in and after this moment depends on this present.

"Booth," I say, "You wanna go somewhere with me?"

We come back just before the baby is born. In my hand I have a small stuffed spider—biologically incorrect, but undeniably cute—purchased from a nearby Toys-R-Us.

"The baby is crowning. I think it has black hair," Brennan reports.

"Would you like to catch?" the doctor asks.

"Um…" The birth class teacher's voice pops into my head. _Birth is an amazing experience! Be as involved as you can, dads! _"Sure."

The doctor demonstrates how and where to stand and then steps back. Within minutes, I'm holding my screaming, purple, goo-covered, black-haired baby girl.

"It's a girl," I announce proudly, incredulously. We'd chosen to keep the gender a secret, but I always thought she was a boy. "It's a _girl._"

An hour and a half later, the room is quiet. Angela is sound asleep and I sit in the chair by her bed, holding our newborn daughter. She has springy dark hair and cloudy blue eyes—"They might change," the nurse said, "but she just might have her daddy's baby blues."—and her name is Marigold. No particular reason except for Angela's whimsy. I call her Mari. "Hey, Mari," I say softly. "Hey, Marigold, I got something for you. You wait here and I'll get it for you." I set her in her bassinette and reach for the bag. "See, Marigold? Spider. Brachypelma Emilia, I think. You can never be too sure with these stupid toys. That's for you. That's from your daddy."

Mari blinks and sighs, and even though it's impossible, I swear I can see her smile.

I've read every book I could find, took the classes, watched the videos, babysat Parker two afternoons a week, practiced getting up in the middle of the night by blasting bagpipe music over the intercom at random intervals, but nothing could have prepared me for the real thing, for the look on Angela's face, for the rush of love I felt, more intense than anything else I've ever known.

It wasn't all sweet and sunny, though.

Babies look a little like aliens until they're cleaned off.

Hell hath no fury like a laboring woman without pain medication for 12 hours.

Birth might be amazing, but it's mostly grotesque.

And I look at dirt, slime, and bugs for a living.


	3. Motherhood

For eight weeks, the only person who knew was Brennan.

"I don't know what to do. I mean...we've only talked about it in the context of 'maybe someday'. I can't have a baby, Brennan, I'm the most selfish person I know. When you have a baby you get all...I don't know. Old and fat and boring, I guess. I'm not ready to give my own life up...that must make me sound horrible."

She was quiet for a long time, and I was sure she was agreeing with me. "No," she finally said. "Angela, you're the least selfish person I know, and I'm not just saying that because you're my friend. I don't do that. You always think about other people before you think of yourself, and people genuinely like you. When I think of selfish, I certainly don't think of you."

I smiled, mainly to keep myself from bursting into tears. "Thanks, Sweetie."

"You're welcome." She picked up her keys from the table. "I can still take you to the clinic if you think that's what should be done."

"I just don't know if he'll still love me if I have an abortion," I said, finally starting to cry.

She wrapped her arms awkwardly around me and we sat back on the couch. "Angela, Jack will love you no matter what you do. I know this. I was locked in a car underground with him. He would rather die than think that you were unhappy."

"I think...I think I have to think about it."

I told Jack after we worked on the case with the family. Seeing the way they died—protecting each other—made me realize that I did, in fact, want a family, and if it was right now, then so be it. He reacted differently than I expected—half of me had expected him to be upset, but maybe Brennan was right.

"Jack," I said later, "Do you really want this baby?"

He rolled over to look at me. "Yes. Don't you?"

"I...yes. But I didn't want you...I didn't want you thinking that you had to pretend to be excited because _I'm _excited."

He kissed my forehead and held me close. "No. I love you. God, Angela, I didn't even think about having kids with Clarissa, okay? I love you, and I want to have children with you."

"Okay. I love you, too. Goodnight, Jack."

Those classes we took? They didn't tell us anything. They didn't tell me how much it would hurt or how scary it would be. They didn't tell me that Jack would freak out—my tough-guy slime man, of all people—and leave Brennan to coach while he disappeared off to God-knows-where.

"I want to die," I told her.

"No, you don't."

"Yes...I...do. Ican'ttakethis_anymore_!"

"Angela, just..." She looked about as lost as I felt, now that I think of it. "Breathe."

"Where is he, anyway? Where is that fucking man?"

She smoothed down my hair. "He's out in the hallway with Booth. Do you want me to get him?"

"You're doing great, Mrs. Hodgins."

"My last name is _Montenegro, _damn it!"

"How you doin'?"

"Jack! You're here. She was asking for you."

"We're almost there, Dr. Hodgins. Would you like to catch the baby?"

"Um..." He seemed like he wasn't sure about that, so I shot him a look. "Okay."

For months before the baby was born, I tried to imagine what it would be like to have one. I even drew pictures—sweet little curly-haired boys with dirt under their fingernails, sweet little curly-haired girls with paint on their dresses—but it was always a semi-lucid hallucination until the moment I saw her.

_Her, _mottled purple and red, dark-haired and furious, shreiking and wailing and kicking, so angry with us for evicting her from her warm waterbed. There was an eternity of this and then an indignant grunt as they cleaned her, weighed her (8 pounds 4 ounces, 21 inches. That's something to be proud of pushing out of your body without drugs.) and wrapped her up to hand her to Jack to hand her to me, which is when I finally got a good look at my daughter.

"What's her name?" Jack asked, his hand hovering protectively over the baby's head.

We had talked about names. Pages of names, whole notebooks full of names, until we finally came to a decision: if it was a boy, he picked the first name and I picked the middle name, and if it was a girl, I picked the first name and he picked the middle name, as long as we both could live with it. ("No 'Link'." "What? Awww!") "Marigold. Her name is Marigold."

"Marigold." He smiled and stroked her hair. "She looks like a Marigold."

"Marigold what?"

"Louise. Just in case she doesn't grow up crazy like you and wants to be plain old Louise."

I looked at her, then back at him. Her hair was curly, or at least it was slightly kinky. Just like i'd imagined. "I think we have a winner."

He kissed her forehead and then mine. "We'd have had one anyway."

"Jack?" I said hesitantly.

"What?"

"I...I almost didn't keep the baby."

"I know."

"You do?"

He nodded. "After you told us, I found the card in your office."

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"What do you have to be sorry for?" he asked, holding out his arms so that he could hold her for a while. "You didn't, she's here, we love her, and that's all that counts. And you know what? I'd have loved you anyway. I may not have agreed with that decision, and I would've been hurt that you didn't talk to me, but I'd have loved you anyway, because there is not one thing in the whole world that could make me stop. Okay? It's late, and you haven't slept in awhile. You need to sleep, because I guarantee that Marigold Louise here isn't going to do much sleeping when we get home. I love you, Angela."

"I love you, Jack. I love you, Marigold."

As I fall asleep, I remind myself to always, _always _listen to Brennan.


End file.
